Urban uprising.

Emeryville, California, is "bright" instead of "blight." This corridor of land, contaminated with hydrocarbons, heavy metals, and chlorinated solvents, is being cleaned up for transformation into retail, hotel, and office complexes, creating 10,600 new jobs. In addition to a $200,000 grant from the EPA, the town leveraged $644 million in private investments, and hungry developers have come calling. On the other side of the country, the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, worked with Westinghouse Corporation to redevelop an abandoned plant. An industrial park is in the works, which will provide 400 new jobs. That success spurred Bridgeport to identify 28 other local sites to be detoxified and rejuvenated. So far, 120 acres have been cleaned up with the help of $15 million in private funding and $133 million in public investments. These successes at urban renewal represent a new recognition by the federal government of the flaws in the ponderous and fiscally punitive practices that had long been championed in the name of environmental cleanup. Those practices started with the 1976 passage of the Resource Conservation and Regulation Act, which regulated waste management, and became entrenched with the _ 1980 Comprehensive Response, Compensation , and Liability 5U Act and its Superfund program. Inspired by the Love Canal disaster of the late 1970s, in which buried toxic waste began resurfacing in creeks, sewers, basements , and even the school playground of the unsuspecting New York community, Superfund requires cleanup of toxic sites to the level that a child could eat the soil without adverse health effects. Liability to the landowner is open-ended, consisting of payment for cleanup of all past contamination. Despite the EPA's good intentions, one early, notable result of Superfund was recalcitrant landowners who abandoned their contaminated lands. These sites were left untouched by banks and developers, who were reluctant to take on such risky properties. By 1995, more than 38,000 such sites with proven or suspected contamination had been reported to the EPA as potential Superfund sites. The EPA's National Priorities List of the worst sites approached 1,300 sites, compared to only 300 sites that had been cleaned up. regional areas to create pilot programs for the renewal of "brownfields," defined by the EPA as abandoned, idle, or underused industrial and commercial facilities where expansion or redevelopment is confounded by real or perceived environmental contamination. In its broadest definition, the term "brownfields" can apply to anything from spillage at …